<?php
/**
 * <https://y.st./>
 * Copyright © 2016 Alex Yst <mailto:copyright@y.st>
 * 
 * This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
 * it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 * the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
 * (at your option) any later version.
 * 
 * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
 * GNU General Public License for more details.
 * 
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 * along with this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org./licenses/>.
**/

$xhtml = array(
	'title' => 'A week in Springfield ...',
	'body' => <<<END
<p>
	As I rode to work last night, I quickly came across a police officer that appeared to be lying in wait in the dark, presumably trying to catch people committing traffic violations.
	It&apos;s a good thing that my mother bought me these bicycle lights after all! I still haven&apos;t had time to look into how to shop for good bicycle lights, so I wouldn&apos;t have gotten them myself yet.
	I can handle the injuries, but I don&apos;t need the law coming down on me too.
	Then again, while I do have time to get myself injured, I don&apos;t have time or money to continually replace inner tubes either.
	Later on in my ride, I came across another police officer that might have hassled me about not having lights, but this one didn&apos;t appear to be be looking for trouble.
	Instead, he&apos;d just stopped at a fast food joint for a bite to eat.
</p>
<p>
	I stopped at Subway again for another sandwich, running into the same employee that didn&apos;t ask about cheese last time.
	This time however, he did.
	Maybe it&apos;s not policy after all that this Subway doesn&apos;t add cheese to vegetable sandwiches.
	That&apos;s too bad.
</p>
<p>
	I&apos;m now almost certain that I already had my flat tire before I began riding to work two days ago.
	Lack of gear shifting or not, peddling was much easier.
	I&apos;m convinced that the inner tube only became damaged because I crashed the bicycle.
	As long as I use these lights and behave reasonably carefully, there shouldn&apos;t be a repeat of this any time soon.
</p>
<p>
	Yesterday, three out of the five albums that I listened to were ambient music.
	Ambient music really isn&apos;t suitable for listening to while trying to perform very fast labor, and it was not a pleasant experience.
	Today, I was not going to do that again! Instead of attempting to start my reviews on new albums, I just shuffled together all of my Professor Shyguy music and Brant Cooley music, minus the album The Instrumentals.
	I wasn&apos;t going to torture myself with music that was unfit for working today; working here is hard enough as it is.
</p>
<p>
	It turned out to be an easy last day of work, though I found out that the boss doesn&apos;t get a lunch break.
	Is that even legal? How do I sign up to work and get paid during those thirty minutes? I&apos;m not sure if the ease of work had to do with the machines being slowed down or if I was just better prepared.
	I had a nice sandwich for a proper meal, I had potatoes for sustained energy, and I had upbeat Shyguy music playing in one ear.
	Near the end of my shift, the boss said something about us being watched, and showed me the camera that had been recording me over the past couple weeks.
	In a semi-public setting like this, I assumed that I&apos;d been watched at all times, but I just didn&apos;t know from what angle until now.
	It occurred to me too that maybe I&apos;m not an employee of this factory&apos;s company, but of the temp agency.
	My paycheck did come from the temp agency, after all.
	I asked my boss about that, and he confirmed my suspicion.
	So what is my job title then? What do I put on my resume? The paperwork says that the position that I&apos;m filling is that of an extruder (I guess the position has the same name as the machine), but that&apos;s not my position with the temp agency.
	Do I even have a title to put on a resume? Should I just call myself a temporary worker? When I get a chance, I should ask the temp agency about that.
	I didn&apos;t have time for that today though.
	The boss also said some things about how he received his pay through the temp agency too, which a bit latter, made me wonder if he too is a temporary worker somehow.
	I get the impression that he&apos;s been there for quite a while though.
	Before the shift was scheduled to end, we filled the order that we were working on, which was the last in our queue.
	The other employee took off.
	I&apos;m not sure if he was told to or not, but I didn&apos;t hear the boss tell me to go, so I stayed.
	I kind of hung out near the boss so that he&apos;d know I was there, but stayed out of his way while he reconfigured the extruder for Monday&apos;s work crew.
	He gave me occasional instructions, but there wasn&apos;t much that he could have me do.
	He ended up showing me the extruder in a bit more depth, presumably because I&apos;d showed interest before, so I took the opportunity to ask a few other question I had about it.
	As I had suspected, the water is used purely for cooling.
	It isn&apos;t needed for anything else.
	Having so little time lately though, I didn&apos;t get to writing this weblog entry as soon as I should have, so I can&apos;t recall what else I&apos;ve learned.
	I should have taken better notes, if nothing else.
</p>
<p>
	The other boss didn&apos;t show up today.
	I was going to confirm with him that he was canceling the shift that he&apos;d offered me.
	Instead, I just double-checked with the boss on duty that I was not to show up next week and wouldn&apos;t be in trouble if I didn&apos;t show.
	Of course, getting in trouble was actually the least of my worries.
	I just needed an excuse to ask again and be sure, as I would really love to keep my job if possible.
	It&apos;s not the best job, but it provides a paycheck and doesn&apos;t require me to produce proprietary software/media.
</p>
<p>
	On the way home, I found that my bicycle&apos;s seat was coming apart at the front, exposing some strange, small, metal spikes.
	These spikes were damaging my pants.
	I stopped at the store to pick up some duct tape to repair it.
	The bike seat already looks like trash, a little duct tape won&apos;t make it any worse.
	The bicycle seat covers at that place are way too expensive though, and would have cost more than the second-hand bicycle did.
	As I was about to check out, I noticed the health food section.
	Instead of being in the food half of the store, it was in the non-food half.
	No wonder I didn&apos;t find it before! They don&apos;t seem to carry vegan fake cheeses though, which is a let down.
</p>
<p>
	It seems that my mother wants me to work on cleaning up our old house and boxing stuff for about a week.
	I will very likely not have Internet access, so I might not be able to update the weblog in that time.
	Also, if the modem goes down, I won&apos;t be there to bring it back up.
	Thankfully, I have the workaround in place for that $a[Tor] bug that was causing $a[Tor] to shut down when the modem goes down.
	When my siblings or mother get around to resetting the modem, $a[Tor] will be ready to continue taking connections and providing this onion and its services.
	It seems that my mother and I leave for Springfield tomorrow.
</p>
<p>
	I didn&apos;t get much rest, as almost as soon as I got home, we all (Cyrus, Vanessa, our mother, and I) headed out to places unknown to me at the time.
	On the way, my mother was going on about how she thinks that war veterans should be identifiable even without their veteran paperwork and that they should have some sort of marking on their $a[DMV] $a[ID] cards.
	I explained that there is an optional designation that they can get on their $a[ID] cards, so she said that this designation should be mandatory.
	What? Has she no sense of privacy whatsoever? What if they don&apos;t want to self-identify? Based solely on the privacy issues, this would be completely unacceptable.
	Cyrus tried to explain that to our mother, but she just went off about how they should be proud and whatnot, so they should want this to be mandatory.
	The thing is though, if they want it, it wouldn&apos;t need to be mandatory; they&apos;d just get the designation that she wants them all to have.
	To force it on them is to treat them as lesser, not greater, for having, as she puts it, &quot;served our country&quot;.
	If these people truly are as great as she feels that they are, we shouldn&apos;t be forcing anything on them above and beyond what we force on our civilians.
	On a more technical note though, we&apos;d have to overhaul the system somehow to provide the forced designation that my mother wants.
	The thing is, they provide the designation when you ask for it, but you have to bring in proof of veteran status at that time.
	To make it mandatory, you&apos;d need nonveterans to prove that they aren&apos;t veterans, otherwise, a veteran could simply neglect to bring in their proof.
	Honestly, should there be proof of nonveteran status? How would one even obtain proof that they are indeed not a veteran? That seems outright idiotic and serves only so that people can pry into business that isn&apos;t their own.
	We already live in a surveillance state, we don&apos;t need to make it worse, especially for arbitrary and freedom-restricting reasons.
</p>
<p>
	On the way out, I asked our mother to stop at the bank.
	If I&apos;m headed to Springfield tomorrow, I&apos;ll need food money, and by the time she said we&apos;d be back, the bank would be closed.
	However, the bank&apos;s lobby was closed and they were only providing drive-through service.
	Pedestrians could walk through, but there was a long line and I didn&apos;t want to hold my mother up from what she wanted to go do.
	I&apos;ll just make due with what money I have.
	Later, I regretted that decision though.
	It turned out that the place that she hadn&apos;t told me that we were going was some sort of emergency preparedness training with the people that she&apos;s upset that I don&apos;t want to prove my identity to! When we got there though, it seemed that she was wrong or had mistakingly called it a &quot;training&quot;, as it was really just a bunch of random booths set up, one of which was run by the emergency preparedness group and the rest of which were not.
	They had a drawing, which asked for a name and telephone number, so I asked if I could use an email address instead.
	They said that that was fine, though I&apos;m not going to win, so it didn&apos;t really matter.
</p>
<p>
	After visiting the booths, we all headed for the hills to pick up bullet shells again.
	I was exhausted by this point, though I started to get out of the vehicle.
	It seems that my mother has assumed that I&apos;d stay in and try to get some rest though, so I sat back down and tried to do that.
	I didn&apos;t really get any until they had finished and we were nearly home.
	I fell asleep for what I assume was only several minutes, as I remember seeing landmarks near home and Cyrus says that I wasn&apos;t out in the vehicle alone for very long.
</p>
<p>
	My Josh Woodward album, Addresses to the Stars, came in the mail today, along with a piece of paper that he&apos;d written on during the song-writing process.
	Some people probably paid more towards Woodward&apos;s Kickstarter campaign to get one of these, but I only paid more to get my name in the album cover.
	There&apos;s an off chance that someone will try to figure out who these people are, which would lead people to my website.
	The more that I think about it though, maybe it wasn&apos;t the brightest idea; the chance of this leading to any visitors is slim.
	Now that I have the paper note from Woodward though, I might as well take a closer look at it.
	I&apos;m too tired to make sense of it right now, but when I get back from Springfield, I&apos;ll see what&apos;s on it.
</p>
END
);
